News tagged with chemotherapy
Awakening to new drugs against sleeping sickness
Sleeping sickness kills tens of thousands of people in Africa each year. Current chemotherapies are subject to various limitations, including resistance. Rhodesain, an enzyme of the parasites that cause this ...
Cancer
May 17, 2013 |
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Study IDs key protein for cell death, offers way to kill cancer cells by forcing them into programmed-death pathway
When cells suffer too much DNA damage, they are usually forced to undergo programmed cell death, or apoptosis. However, cancer cells often ignore these signals, flourishing even after chemotherapy drugs have ...
Genetics
May 14, 2013 |
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Research to end asbestos-related cancer
Scientists from Flinders University are trying to develop a new treatment for a highly aggressive, asbestos-related lung cancer that is set to become more prevalent in the future.
Cancer
May 16, 2013 |
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Preclinical tests shows agent stops 'slippery' proteins from binding, causing Ewing sarcoma
Continuous infusion of a novel agent not only halted the progression of Ewing sarcoma in rats, while some tumors also regressed to the point that cancer cells could not be detected microscopically, say researchers at Georgetown ...
Cancer
May 15, 2013 |
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Discovery may help prevent chemotherapy-induced anemia
Cancer chemotherapy can cause peripheral neuropathy—nerve damage often resulting in pain and muscle weakness in the arms and legs. Now, researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University have discovered ...
Medical research
May 05, 2013 |
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Scientists develop simple blood test to track tumour evolution in cancer patients
By tracking changes in patients' blood, Cambridge scientists have created a new way of looking at how tumours evolve in real-time and develop drug resistance. The research was published in the print edition ...
Cancer
May 03, 2013 |
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FDA approves genetic test for lung cancer drug
The Food and Drug Administration says it approved a genetic test from Roche to help doctors identify patients who can benefit from a lung cancer drug made by Genentech.
Medications
May 14, 2013 |
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Individual efficacy of chemotherapies
The function of the mitochondria – also defined as "power plants" within the cells – is essential as to whether, and how, some chemotherapeutic agents take effect in tissue. Scientists at the Helmholtz ...
Cancer
May 10, 2013 |
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Women have more options for breast cancer surgery (Update 2)
One of the world's most glamorous women had an operation that once was terribly disfiguring—removal of both breasts. But new approaches are dramatically changing breast surgeries, whether to treat cancer or to prevent it ...
Cancer
May 14, 2013 |
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Exercise could reduce bone tumor growth
(Medical Xpress)—Weight-bearing exercise, often prescribed to combat bone loss, might have anti-cancer effects. Cornell biomedical researchers report that mechanical stimulation of cancerous bone, in making ...
Cancer
May 07, 2013 |
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Initiation of breast cancer treatment varies by race; patient-doctor communication is key
Black women with breast cancer were found to be three times more likely than their white counterparts to delay treatment for more than 90 days—a time delay associated with increased deaths from the disease, according to ...
Cancer
May 07, 2013 |
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Discovery holds potential in destroying drug-resistant bacteria
Through the serendipity of science, researchers at the University of Pittsburgh have discovered a potential treatment for deadly, drug-resistant bacterial infections that uses the same approach that HIV uses to infect cells. ...
Medical research
May 07, 2013 |
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Researchers abuzz over caffeine as cancer-cell killer
(Medical Xpress)—Researchers from the University of Alberta are abuzz after using fruit flies to find new ways of taking advantage of caffeine's lethal effects on cancer cells—results that could one day ...
Cancer
Apr 18, 2013 |
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Chemo, radiation followed by surgery improves survival in lung cancer patients
In one of the largest observational studies of its kind, researchers report that a combination of chemotherapy and radiation followed by surgery in patients with stage 3 non-small cell lung cancer improves survival.
Cancer
Apr 30, 2013 |
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Med errors common among pediatric cancer outpatients
(HealthDay)—Among pediatric cancer patients who receive medications at home, errors are common, with a rate of 3.6 errors with injury per 100 patients, according to a study published online April 29 in ...
Pediatrics
Apr 29, 2013 |
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Chemotherapy
Chemotherapy, in its most general sense, refers to treatment of disease by chemicals that kill cells, both good and bad, but specifically those of micro-organisms or cancerous tumours. In popular usage, it refers to antineoplastic drugs used to treat cancer or the combination of these drugs into a cytotoxic standardized treatment regimen. In its non-oncological use, the term may also refer to antibiotics (antibacterial chemotherapy). In that sense, the first modern chemotherapeutic agent was Paul Ehrlich's arsphenamine, an arsenic compound discovered in 1909 and used to treat syphilis. This was later followed by sulfonamides discovered by Domagk and penicillin discovered by Alexander Fleming.
Most commonly, chemotherapy acts by killing cells that divide rapidly, one of the main properties of cancer cells. This means that it also harms cells that divide rapidly under normal circumstances: cells in the bone marrow, digestive tract and hair follicles; this results in the most common side effects of chemotherapy—myelosuppression (decreased production of blood cells), mucositis (inflammation of the lining of the digestive tract) and alopecia (hair loss).
Other uses of cytostatic chemotherapy agents (including the ones mentioned below) are the treatment of autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis and the suppression of transplant rejections (see immunosuppression and DMARDs). Newer anticancer drugs act directly against abnormal proteins in cancer cells; this is termed targeted therapy.
For more information about Chemotherapy, read the full article at
Wikipedia.
This text uses material from Wikipedia and is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.
